‘Oh, yes, that’s about your mark, isn’t it, Paddy? She’s just on ten but always older than her years. A slut in the making we’ve got here! It’ll be down to Nellie Deakins next with her, I suppose.’

‘Why is it that Eileen who didn’t want to go went, and me who wants to go, and for a pound a week more, can’t? You tell me that, Mum?’

‘You wouldn’t understand, Briony, because you take after him, your father. You’d sell your soul for what you wanted. Well, you can go, girl, but I tell you now - I don’t ever want you back under my roof!’

Briony looked at her mother long and hard, then at the silent girls sitting around the table.

‘Well, that’s a funny thing, you know, Mum, because I’ll be paying for the roof I ain’t allowed under. I bet you won’t throw his three quid back in his face, will you?’

Kissing her sisters in turn, she put on the brick red coat that she loved, pulled on her boots and, motioning to her father, went outside and sat on the steps to wait for him. Inside her chest was a ball of misery. She’d only wanted to help, but it had been thrown back in her face. Well, the three quid would soon soften the blow so far as her mother was concerned. But all the same, it galled Briony and hurt her too. Why was what she was doing wrong? When Eileen did it, when she didn’t even want to do it, it had been right. She swallowed back a sob.

Still, she’d had her way, and she brightened herself up now by thinking of the hot bath, the lice-free hair and nice soft nightie that was to come. She closed her mind to the other. As Mrs Prosser Evans always said at Sunday school: ‘Sufficient to the time thereof.’ She’d worry about that bit when she came to it.

Paddy stood in the hallway of the house in Ripple Road feeling depressed. The smell of cleanliness and the absolute quiet of the place gave him the heebie jeebies, as he expressed it. He always felt clumsy and dirty when he came to the house, and it shamed him. It shamed him that he had sold off his Eileen to Henry Dumas; it galled him now that his Briony, the only one of his daughters with a spark of real life, wanted to come here. Couldn’t wait to get here. It was all she had talked about on the way. And yet, as much as he’d hated listening, deep inside himself he didn’t blame the child. Not really.